Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Development of New Rabies Vaccine

Yisheng Biopharma has recently developed a new rabies vaccine; it's efforts are focused on providing a faster and more effective response as a post-exposure prophylaxis mechanism. The vaccine is currently in human clinical trials in Singapore. Animal models showed that even after animals were initially injected with an extremely high dose of rabies virus and then rescued with the new vaccine, 80% of the animals survived (in comparison to 20% with commercially available vaccines).

Rabies is still a severe public health problem in China, and remains one of the top three most fatal acute infectious diseases (with over 60K deaths in 2013). The vaccine utilizes PIKA-adjuvant technology, which is a double stranded RNA which acts as a toll-like receptor 3 (TLR-3) ligand to the activation of innate immune cells (which include dendritic cells, natural killer cells and macrophages).